“Often,” answered Edwin, and “Often” came back instantly.

“In that case, Mr. Forrester,” said Mrs. Parker, “why don’t you get a wife?  There’s no company for a young man like a good wife.  Here’s Miss Ormiston; I don’t think you could do better.”

Think of the delicate wound of these young people being thus openly probed in broad moonlight in the presence of so many people!  What could Mrs. Parker be thinking of?  Not of her own love-passages surely, or, if she was, they must have been of a blunter order than those of the Rose and her lover.

“Oh no,” said Bessie in cool, indifferent tones:  “Mr. Forrester knows better than that.”

“There!” said Edwin, “you see, Mrs. Parker, I have been refused.”

“‘Faint heart never won fair lady,’” said Mrs. Parker.

The boys hallooed this sentiment to the echo, and the echo took it up and sent it back so vigorously that even a timid man might have been inspired.  “Mary Stuart,” “Henry Darnley,” “James Bothwell,” the lads went on calling to the echo alternately—­names which are not mere echoes even after three hundred years, but live on by sheer force of tragic romance.  And it was possible that here, on this very spot, that historical trio had stood and laughed and talked and amused themselves as the young Ormistons and their visitors were doing.  What words had they used to rouse the echo?  If only it could be made to give them back now, what a wonderful echo it would be!  The world would come to listen to it.  Would it tell of the passions of love and ambition, grief and hatred, all hurrying their victims to their doom? or was the place sacred only to gentler memories and softer moods—­the scene of enjoyment and freedom from care for however short a time?  Who can tell?

There was a woman in the village of Cockhoolet who was ninety-eight years old, having all her faculties not perhaps quite so fresh as when she was nineteen, but in wonderful preservation after having been in daily use for little short of a century.  She was one of a long-lived race:  her father had been eighty-nine when he died, and her grandfather ninety-nine.  Now, it is perfectly possible—­and, as the family had been on the spot for centuries, it is even probable—­that her great-grandfather might have dug the hole in which Mary planted her tree, or he may have saddled the queen’s horse when she went hunting, or stood by the roadside and lifted his bonnet as she and her gay train swept by.  Or he may have been despatched upon royal errands through the subterranean passage which is said to exist all the way between Cockhoolet Castle and Edinburgh—­the private telegraph of those days, when wires in the air or under the sea by which to send messages would have cost the inventors their lives as guilty of witchcraft.  While shaking hands with this old woman and speaking to her, you lost sight of her and the present time and felt the air of the sixteenth century blow in